Hooking Your Readers

The Read:  Well, growl-ly Luna and Caitlin Kittredge finally hooked me for the final third of Pure Blood.   But, the need to see how Kittredge tied all the loose ends together kept me going -- not any particular involvement with the characters.  They remained too simply drawn to tie up my interest against all the other distractions in my life.

Kittredge had all the major secondary characters sunk up to their necks in danger, including Luna.  She did end up with the love interest she preferred,  discovered the supposed "partner" was planted to build a case for firing her, and managed to destroy the nasty magical talisman that was causing all the trouble in an interesting fashion.  More important, as a foreshadowing for the sequels, Kittredge suggests that Luna isn't the magical null Luna and her family of witches thinks she is.  --  However, I won't go looking for the next book in the series.  [The plot's more complicated so this paragraph isn't quite the spoiler you might think.]

The True Blood DVDs still absorb my after-the-news reading time -- until midnight.  I can get two episodes in if I don't do anything else.  Am thinking of getting one of the later books in the series and comparing the two.  While the acting in the TV series is good over all, I think some of the actors for the secondary characters -- like Jason and Tara -- often go over the top and make caricatures of their characters.

Web Notes:  The momentus things one learns on Twitter:  Colleen Lindsay (agent at Fine Print) was out of coffee beans.  Yasmine Galenorn ( the creator of the D'Artigo sisters though I prefer Emerald O'Brien) needs coffee to write sex scenes. 

Galenorn also recommends that you never play on the web drunk.  What you say might come back and bite you.

Maybe, this is an example of why I spend so much time on the web?  No, I seldom visit Twitter.  As for Facebook, I mostly check for family and personal friends.

So much for building a platform ... though I still think you need an audience in mind before you can do it.

Progress:   None.  Struggling.  Can't even get a query draft for Emma done.

Trivia:  The Dark Wyrm [book review site, http://darkwyrmreads.blogspot.com ]  sabotaged my to-read pile.  She held a contest with Strange Brew, a collection of short stories by the likes of Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, Charlaine Harris, and would you believe, Caitlin Kittredge.  Something strange happened; I won.  Do you think I can't keep my hands off it? 

Since I can't write short  fiction, I won't be commenting on any of the stories.  Though liked the twist on who was messing with Harry Dresden's favorite beer.